Everybody Stinks: The Life and Work of a Failed Southern Lady

Related Books:

1.Florence King, author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, died this January at the age of 80. She was a humorist, columnist for the conservative journal National Review, literary critic, onetime smut writer, and misanthrope who “dwelled in that 14th Amendment of the human spirit known as ‘Everybody stinks.’” (Her words.) Humans may have been unworthy of her respect, but language was sacred: “I don’t care what people do to each other but I care passionately about what they do to English.”

King was an expert categorizer of people: Southern ladies and gentlemen (“other people enter houses but Southerners surge in on the wings of speech”); “that many-splendored thing called a good ole boy”; High WASPs, whose priorities can be gleaned from their grocery lists (“Alpo, 9-Lives, Harper’s, tomato juice, Worcestershire, Tabasco, vodka, food”); the New Hypochondriacs, who “want to skip both illness and health so they can get to prevention and recovery, co-dependency and enabling;” and William “Bill” Fletcher, the embodiment of the regular American guy. He is a loud, importuning “self-proclaimed expert at spotting arcane lubricious distinctions across a crowded room” who subjects women to lecherous bonhomie:

A woman is wise to shriek with laughter over [his] bon mots. If she merely smiles wryly she is effectively announcing that she has experienced mild pleasure but not orgasm. In William “Bill” Fletcher’s world, “Did I make you laugh?” and “Did I make you come?” are interchangeable questions, so he keeps pumping away, repeating the punch line and elbowing her in the ribs in a symbolic attempt to send her over the top. Fake the laugh. If you don’t, he will put a comforting arm around your shoulders and say, “You’d be a great gal if only you’d develop a sense of humor.”

Woe to him who finds himself the object of King’s withering gaze, be he a boorish flirt or the male Southern author of dynastic novels:

He must show a long line of men, each of whom was half as good as the daddy before him, until he gets to the autobiographical character who, by definition, has undergone the most complete mathematical reduction of all.

What an elegant way to call someone a zero.

King labored over her crisp, epigrammatic prose — “Some women primp; I rewrite” — and used it gleefully to mock what she saw as the excesses or shortcomings of liberal culture: its fulsome praise of multiculturalism; conviction that well-funded government programs can fix all societal ills; sanctimonious outrage; fatuous buzzwords; and a leveling tendency that deprived the world of its heroes and its once noble breed of “hussies.” Waxing nostalgic for the old “hierarchies that once made life colorful and provocative,” she laments in a 1992 essay that “hussydom, by definition an elite sisterhood, has been democratized.” Her flimsy argument: Whereas once verbally dexterous libertines like Nell Gwynne, who calmed an anti-Catholic mob surrounding her carriage by explaining that she was Charles II’sProtestantwhore, filled the annals of gossipy history with their bon mots, today “egalitarianism has replaced the arch wordplay of sexual tension with the soporific drone of equal partners.”

King’s essays are rife with controversial opinions and slopes plunging towards phantom precipices. “Willincestist make it to the majors?” she wonders à propos of the burgeoning culture of universal acceptance: “Anything is possible in a madhouse, even a very small madhouse, and the one I’m talking about stretches from sea to sea.” This is King doing her best right-wing radio host impression, and indeed, her relentless insensitivity, however wittily expressed, can be tiresome and unpalatable. So can relentless sensitivity, she would surely rejoin.

Satire pollutes even as it cleanses, and King’s is no exception. Her Juvenalian derision blazes a trail through a thicket — make that a forest — of liberal pieties: “Feminists will not be satisfied until every abortion is performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on a reservation for handicapped Indians,” reads her most notorious line about the culture war’s arms race. King’s sneering dismissal of anything that smacked of liberalism is perhaps surprising given the sexism and bigotry she faced as a bisexual woman coming of age in the 1950s. At her freshman college orientation, the president welcomed the incoming class by avowing that he’d “never seen a prettier collection of females in all my days…You’ve got a fine supply of heifers for the barbecue tomorrow, fellas.” King entered into her first lesbian relationship while a graduate student at Ole Miss in the 1950s. The menacing anonymous calls her lover received clues her into “the Deep South’s exquisite balance between hatred and hospitality.” But King was at heart a Randian libertarian, seeing identity politics as antithetical to her sacred sense of individualism and thus worthy of scorn.

She conceived of feminism, for example, as an elite rather than universal sisterhood, as:

…the freemasonry that exists among intelligent women who know they are intelligent. It is the only kind of female bonding that works, which is why most men do not like intelligent women. They don’t mind one female brain if they can enjoy it privately; it’s the idea of two or more on the loose that upsets them.

Some icons don’t merit entry into this freemasonry. In her criticism, King disparages Erica Jong’s “sow-in-heat prose style;” calls Gloria Steinem the “divine afflatus of feminism who has made a career of leading the herd to trendy saltlicks;” and describes Betty Friedan’s case histories as having “the dreary gusto of public service announcements and television commemorative minutes.” She is vicious on scholars who have a “penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics,” and equally vicious on the supposedly third-rate neurotics themselves. Sylvia Plath, “feminism’s patron saint,” comes in for particularly harsh treatment, particularly her decision to undergo psychotherapy:

Now she became a shrink’s pet, intent on having the best anxieties, the neatest dreams, the sharpest memories; striving for straight A’s in penis envy, gold stars in schizophrenia, and the Electra Complex honor roll. The handwriting was on the wall and it said Phi Beta Kaput.

One could justly call this callous and unfair, but as invective it approaches perfection.

2.King wrote many Regency romances and bodice rippers (The Barbarian Princess) under pseudonyms, her writing career beginning when a true confessions magazine accepted one of her stories, “I Committed Adultery in a Diabetic Coma.” Her first and only “Florence King” novel, When Sisterhood Was in Flower, features a young writer, Isabel, being “shanghaied into the feminist movement” in the 1970s. “You may as well know, before you get any further into this,” says the narrator early on, “that my politics were and still are Royalist; I believe in absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings. One thing I like about Bloody Mary: she never said a word about lung cancer.”

When Sisterhood Was in Flower is a comic novel about literal and figurative walls — between rooms, people, philosophies. A bomb goes off in the narrator’s Boston apartment building, bringing down the wall separating her apartment from that of her neighbor, Polly. A member of the Bradshaw clan, “leaders of Wasp America’s loony left,” Polly has a Richard Nixon dartboard, hosts a feminist talk show on PBS exploring alternative child birth methods (e.g., the “birth bucket, used for centuries by women before male physicians conspired to make us give birth in a prone position”), and volunteers at a local Self-Sufficiency Center, solemnly explaining to Isabel that “[t]hey need all the help they can get.” Thus are the odd couple, “two people in search of a wavelength,” thrown into a communal living environment.

Each benefits from the situation. Polly wants to help everyone she meets, while the narrator wants material for a satirical novel. The compulsive activist and the chain-smoking, agoraphobic misanthrope become partners of sorts. They eventually head out West to start a women’s commune at a sprawling house in Los Angeles. (Its walls are in danger too, from termites.) By then their group has swelled to include a woman fleeing her survivalist husband and a reticent medieval music historian obsessed with the gruesome death of Edward II, supposedly killed by having a “hote spitte” inserted into his rectum. Without revealing exactly how King works the sad tale of “Poor Ned’s Burnyng Bunghole” into the plot, suffice it to say that the women mount a spirited defense of their castle when it comes under attack from an abusive male.

In his essay on comedy, Henri Bergson identified mental as well as physical rigidity as a central feature of the comic. Polly is the ultimate Bergsonian figure, inflexibly pursuing a “ruthless humanitarianism” with little understanding of the human. Opposing her is the reclusive, and equally inelastic, ironist:

[Polly] would never understand that agoraphobia was my quirky armor against a gregarious America, and a tool that had helped me to acquire the inner resources and private space she wanted for all women.

Polly’s crusading energy puts a chink in that armor, and Isabel’s resistance forces Polly to become marginally more flexible. But this comedy is more about acceptance than conversion; the novel concludes on a utopian note, but still makes it clear that walls crumble more easily than firmly held convictions.

3.Sisterhood is a diverting satire; Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady is a minor masterpiece of autobiography. Like all coming of age stories, its central drama revolves around self-definition. Will the memoir’s heroine turn out to be a Southern gentlewoman, as her grandmother, a “frustrated ladysmith,” would like? Or a “malkin,” her father’s term for a pusillanimous non-entity? Or a “virago,” which as her first female lover explains to her, is “a woman of great stature, strength and courage who is not feminine in the conventional ways”? The Education of Henry Adamsis a key text, particularly Adams’s theory that puritan America deprived its women of any feminine ideals: “An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.” (King’s grandmother objects to his theory on the grounds that Adams is “just some old foreigner who doesn’t understand our ways;” King’s mother repeatedly refers to him erroneously, and contemptuously, as John Quincy Shitass.”)

King grew up in Washington D.C. with her ribald dynamo of a mother, bookish father, a British jazz musician, and her grandmother, one of the great comic creations in American letters. She is an endless source of information about “female trouble,” delivering endless monologues on troublesome wombs — “The Ovariad” King’s father calls them. Later, an African-American woman, Jensy, joins the household ménage, famous along the U Street corridor for her moral rectitude. She returns letters from insufficiently pious relatives by scrawling “Return to Sinner” on the envelope. “The three women who raised me all behaved like freewheeling, slightly mad Popes,” writes King.

The education of Florence King begins with her reluctant schoolchild: “I wasn’t used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child too. I thought I was just short.” She later becomes enamored of French literature, specifically Jean Racine, whose taut dramas open up her world: “Once exposed to the neo-classical restraints of Bérénice, I began to resent males for their power to distract me from the life of the mind I craved.”

Confessionsis also a story of King’s sexual education, and she is, predictably, very funny on sexual miseducation. One of her classmates, presumably a malkin, fears that she must be a nymphomaniac because she had a clitoral orgasm:

The source of her woe was an author whose theory of the subcontracted orgasm read like a directive from the Interstate Commerce Commission. He said that while the clitoris was not licensed to operate independently, it was a spur line of female pleasure that helped carry the delirious consignment to its final destination.

Her frank accounts of her own sexual adventures are equally funny — during one she worries about disrobing because “in the fifties, tits weren’t up to snuff unless they could be used to put out Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear” — but they also allow King to show just how well she could write in a more introspective mode. This she does in the latter part of the book, wherein she coolly assesses heartbreaks and tragedies while displaying her flinty comic resilience.

4.
I should reiterate in closing that this exceptional American humorist was also a bit of a crank. Consider “Two Kidneys in Transplant Time,” an entertaining, if slightly unhinged, essay in which she performs a linguistic analysis of “transplantese:” what we talk about when we talk about organ donation. King was an expert, making a habit of collecting articles on the subject. A sentence from such a clipping strikes her as particularly menacing: “A donor heart was located and flown to the hospital.” The passive voice, “the voice of Sneaky Pete,” puts King on alert. Just what are medical professionals and their journalistic boosters up to? Her hackles raised, King turns her Orwellian glare on the phrase “donor heart:”

People who tailor words to suit their own needs will tailor anything to suit their own needs. The originator of that ‘donor heart’ phrase snatched the noun out of its proper place and put it inwhere it was needed. See what I’m getting at?

By transplanting the noun “donor” into the adjective position, the conspirators have inadvertently laid bare their perfidious plans:

…somebody out there in Democracyland is getting ready to render some of us organ-free for the benefit of the organ-deprived…I have visions of mad dash of Nice Guyism gone awry. The lugubrious pleas for a kidney here, a liver there, a heart in Sheboygan that descend like a sledgehammer on a neurotically friendly nation could easily inspire an organ Robin Hood to kill healthy people just to be able to arrive at the hospital in the nick of time with the needed part.

Behold the paranoid style in American politics in fine form, the scheming Papists of yore replaced by scalpel-wielding good Samaritans. I’d like to add my own, more uplifting vision to accompany King’s dystopian one. In a sick ward, an uninspired humorist of this “neurotically friendly nation” is slowly wasting away. Then a miracle occurs…

I originally thought I wouldn't write about the Publishers WeeklyTop 10 Books of 2009, a list that quickly became infamous not for who's on it, but who isn't. Namely: women. I noticed the absence immediately, but I was more puzzled than troubled. Come on, PW, have you not read Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson? This year, readers and critics have gone gaga for lady authors, from Hillary Mantel to Jayne Anne Phillips, and so it was strange that none would be included on the list. It didn't seem like these editors would have to consciously choose a woman--it would just happen, like breathing. Perhaps I'm naive, or I just like lady authors too much.
I was happy to see Await Your Replyby Dan Chaon and Big Machineby Victor LaValle included, two novels I liked a lot and have championed here on The Millions. But, I also felt sad for these two wonderful writers: would they want to be associated with this list? Chaon and LaValle certainly deserve our attention, but the kind of attention they got from PW, I fear, is a reminder that they use the men's room. See, that's what's happened: the maleness of the list is all people can talk about. A cynical part of me wonders if Publishers Weekly went with these picks precisely because of the outrage they were sure would follow. Nothing increases visibility--and web traffic--like outrage.
Lizzie Skurnick'stake on the list is compelling and worth a read; she writes about the topic with both perspicacity and good humor, and she (rightfully, I think) suggests that the term "ambitious"-- as it's defined by critics and prize judges--is questionable, partially because it is gendered. Like Skurnick, I also don't find the list of notable books by women on the Women in Literature and Literary Arts (WILLA) website all that helpful, either. The wiki nature of the list means that the only requirement to get on this list is that you don't use the men's room. You see, women write good books, and they also write very bad ones. One's gender, like one's ethnicity, isn't a sign of your literary merit or lack thereof. And anyway, ladies don't really need this list. We're doing pretty well for ourselves. After all, women read more than men, and women writers sell more books than male writers. And we do win prizes. Don't forget that this year's Nobel prize winner for literature was female, and that Elizabeth Strout won the Pultizer. In 2004, all of the National Book Award nominees for fiction were female. I remember my annoyance at how much gender was discussed that year. "What about the books themselves?" I kept crying. But, look at me now, lamenting that only sausages got invited to the Top 10 Publishers Weekly party.
My double standard, I suppose, comes from the fact that there's a long and undeniable history of women not getting critical recognition for their writing. I read nearly equal numbers of male and female writers (I keep a record. Seriously.) but I've met numerous male readers (many of them booksellers), who rarely, if ever, read books by women. This argument also extends to work by writers of color. Books by white men are considered universal, while books by women, or people of color, aren't. A male author wins a prize because he deserves it. A Latina woman wins a literary prize because, well... there was pressure... it was time. That's a dangerous and unfair line of reasoning, for it undercuts the talent and accomplishment of these writers.
Edward P. Jones won the Pulitzer for The Known World, not because he's a black dude, but because he wrote an exceptional, brilliant novel. Yes, by giving Jones the prize, the Pulitzer committee championed and validated a narrative about African-Americans, by an African-American, and that is significant. But the writer's race was not the reason he won the prize.
Which brings me to why I'm writing about this when I figured I wouldn't. Last week, the National Book Award winners were announced, and all of them were white men. You might expect me to be upset by this, but I wasn't. A few people I follow on Twitter were, however, and on her blog, author Tayari Joneswrote a genuine and heartfelt reaction to the awards (she attended the ceremony): "I will admit that I don't know what to make of it. I know how it felt to be a woman writer of color that evening. I had a number of weirdly marginalizing personal encounters that evening. I arrived in high spirits and left feeling a bit deflated." This reaction makes a lot of sense to me, and I respect it. But it also must be acknowledged that the judging process was fair--or as fair as can be (Jones does acknowledge this in her post).
The judges for each genre--fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people's literature--don't talk to one another. That is, if the fiction judges choose a white male writer to win, they don't know that the nonfiction judges have as well. Furthermore, the list of nominated books was varied and interesting, and the judges were diverse. (Quite frankly, I'd read anything deemed the best by fiction committee Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Charles Johnson, Lydia Millet and Alan Cheuse.) So I'm all right with the results this year, as discomfiting as they might have been, coming on the heels of that terrible PW list. (And, perhaps it's worth reiterating: do we even need the prizes? Do we need to "put a ring on it" so to speak?)
I'm most weary of lamenting this year's National Book Award winners because it sets up an expectation for next year's winners to be chosen on the basis of something other than literary merit. And if a woman and/or person of color wins the award, the last thing I want to hear is, "Oh, the judges felt pressure," or, "It was time..." That kind of discourse is insidious.
In a dream world, the winners and best-of lists would always be diverse and surprising, and equality would just happen because people read widely, without any ingrained, problematic notions of what's universal or ambitious or important. Now, the question is: how can we make that a reality?

When I worked in advertising, I took solace in knowing that my task was, fundamentally, to tell stories. I believe that; our society's most successful storytellers are probably the people who make television commercials. In one of the 16 or so drafts of my new book, I mention that Folger's commercial where the guy comes home for Christmas and wakes his family by brewing a pot of Folger's. If that ends up in the finished book, I'm confident most readers will know exactly what I'm talking about.
When I worked in advertising, one of my clients, one of this country's largest retailers, used the language of storytelling, which further helped me take solace in my work (the money was quite good, too). They told stories and then sold things, and the story changed every so often, so that the months of the year were like the installments in a collection of short stories. You can guess how some of those stories went: the story was Christmas or the story was Summer or the story was cleaning and organizing or the story was Father's Day or the story was Mother's Day and the moral of the story was buy stuff. Only the stuff changed, and even then, not that much, the same stuffmonth after month, story after story, the way certain writers repeat themselves when it comes to an image or a turn of phrase. Years ago, I noticed a detail in two separate Margaret Atwood works, both novels I think, but I really can't remember; something to do with tenants seeking revenge on a bad landlord by painting the walls black. It's possible I just made this up.
When I worked in advertising, I told myself that anything is a learning experience if you insist it be. I think that holds true. On more than one occasion, I had to write for a sign that could only accommodate four words. Four words is not many, but you can, if you need to, if you're being paid to, get a great deal out of four words. The other day I went to visit an art gallery in Chelsea with a friend, a novelist, and her mother-in-law. My own mother-in-law is an absolutely delightful woman, and other people's mothers-in-law are almost always my favorite people, perhaps because of my fraught relationship with my own mother. When I worked in advertising and I had to tell the story of Mother's Day, I never thought of my own mother. At the gallery, apropos of nothing in particular, my friend said How long is your new book? and I tried to remember the page count and she said No, words, how many words? and I told her it was near 80,000, which is true, and quite a bit longer than those four-word signs I used to write.
When I worked in advertising, I was invited to many meetings and expected to have opinions about things beyond my purview as the writer. People cared, or pretended they did, what I thought about the models, or the music, or the wardrobe, or the director. I realize now that it was not because my opinion had any value (it didn't) but because there's something reassuring about consensus. If we all agreed that this model and that model made a handsome and believable on-screen couple, if we all agreed on the green dress instead of the polka dot one, if we all agreed on the director from Los Angeles instead of the director from London, if we all agreed, then we must all be right.
When I worked in advertising, sometimes the art director I worked with (there were many, and this is true for every one of them) would say What does it look like? She (they were mostly, though not always, women) would be frustrated, because I was using words and she did not think in words; she thought in pictures, which was why she had become an art director in the first place. I would describe, say, a Mother's Day ad, and she would ask What does it look like? I would spin a story about a sweater or a handbag or a lipstick or a stand mixer and she would ask What does it look like? I enjoyed these conversations because they were a bit like the conversations you have with someone on drugs, or a young child; they didn't have to adhere to any particular logic. She could ask What does it look like? and I could tell her it looked like flowers, and Tina Barney's photographs, and happiness, and late afternoon sunlight, and the paintings of John Singer Sargent, and a scone on a chipped porcelain plate and an old American standard sung by someone with a Carly Simon-ish voice but not Carly Simon, and the art director would close her eyes and nod her head slowly.
When I worked in advertising, I learned that I had to be tough enough to toss out ideas to the boss or to the client and not flinch as they were rejected. No, not right a kindly boss might say or That's stupid a different sort of boss might say or Did you read the brief an impatient client might say, but all this, after a time, rolled off of me. If my idea was bad, and no doubt the majority of mine were, it didn't matter. Learning this was incredibly liberating. Once, a very well-known writer said something unkind to me about my book—right to my face!—and I rather wanted to explain that I had plenty of experience with people telling me that my ideas were bad and it didn't matter because that was the job, having bad ideas, and that maybe that was the job of the novelist, too.
When I worked in advertising, the objective was to sell. There's a purity in that, if you think about it. Last summer, I had a long and often angry conversation with another novelist, though we weren't angry with one another. We were talking about beach reads. On the one hand, what writer doesn't want to see lots of people lying on those Turkish-y beach towels that are so in fashion now, cradling the thing you wrote? You should want people to buy your book—you should want to sell!—and read it on the beach or in the bath or in their shrink's waiting room or on the subway or on a park bench whilst eating one of those dry Pret a Manger sandwiches. Of course, you sometimes run into people who think that because your book was marketed as something to be read at the shore that means it's stupid, that you're stupid, that everything is stupid, etc. Maybe everything is stupid; it depends who you ask. I wanted to tell this other novelist that beach reads anagrams to abashed rec, but I didn't, because only a crazy weirdo searches for meaning in anagrams.
Image Credit: Pixabay.

When I think of poor Adam and Eve and their hapless abdication of paradise in return for some new knowledge, I can’t help thinking of my own incremental sense of impending banishment with each new rumor overheard, as a child, from across the border of Adulthood.

Thirty-plus years after reading Lucky Jim for the first time, I don't remember exactly what I thought of the book, why it struck the chord it did with me, why it would turn out to be one of the most important books in my life.